Purgatorio · Canto XVII ·
Purgatorio XVII — The Three Visions of Wrath
Reading Divine Comedy · canto 51 of 100 · Purgatorio, Canto XVII
Before reading
This is the canto that gives the mountain its blueprint. The pilgrim emerges from the smoke of wrath, sees three more visions, is touched by the third angel and loses the third P from his forehead. Then evening falls. The day's climbing is over and the travellers must rest. While they sit on the stair between the terrace of wrath and the terrace of sloth, Virgil delivers the speech the Purgatorio has been building toward since canto IX — the architectural lecture in which the seven terraces are explained as the seven kinds of misdirected love. The doctrine is the structural keystone of the cantica. If you understand it, you understand why pride is at the bottom and lust is at the top, and why the middle terrace, which they are about to enter, is the terrace of not loving the good enough.
Where the canto sits
Like XV before it, this canto is a hinge. It closes wrath, sits the travellers down on a stair, and opens sloth. Like XV, it does two things at once: it walks the pilgrim through the closing visions of the terrace just left, and it gives him an instructional speech in the gap before the next terrace. The pattern is intentional. The Purgatorio's middle cantos — XV, XVI, XVII, XVIII — are deeply doctrinal cantos, and Dante has stitched the doctrine into the climb with a regularity the Inferno never permitted itself.
The doctrine of this canto is the simplest and the most radical of the Commedia's structural ideas: all sin is love. There is no such thing, in Dante's scheme, as an act done from a motive other than love. The wicked do not act out of pure malice or pure stupidity; they act, like everyone else, out of love — but love wrongly aimed, or wrongly proportioned, or wrongly attached. The seven terraces are therefore not a catalogue of seven different things; they are a catalogue of seven ways the one thing can go wrong. Pride, envy, wrath: love of one's own excellence so great it desires the abasement of others. Sloth: love of the supreme good so weak it cannot rouse itself to pursue. Avarice, gluttony, lust: love of legitimate secondary goods to excess, pursued past the measure that would let love of the higher good have its proper share.
The three categories — love perverted toward another's harm, love deficient toward the good, love excessive toward lesser goods — give the mountain its three sections. The lower three terraces (pride, envy, wrath) all share the first kind; the middle terrace (sloth) is the only one in the second category; the upper three (avarice, gluttony, lust) all share the third. The mountain, in other words, is organised by the geometry of love's possible errors.
What it helps to know
The three closing visions of wrath are drawn, like those of meekness in XV, from three traditions. Procne, who from rage at her husband Tereus killed her own son Itys and was changed into the bird forever singing her grief; the source is Ovid, Metamorphoses VI. Haman, the Persian vizier of the book of Esther, who from anger at the Jew Mordecai planned the genocide of all Persia's Jews and ended up crucified — impiccato, hanged — on the gallows he had built for Mordecai. Amata, queen of the Latins in Aeneid XII, who in fury at her daughter Lavinia's coming marriage to Aeneas hanged herself, and whose dying speech opens with the line Dante puts into the vision: O queen, why hast thou wished in anger to be naught?
Pagan myth, Hebrew scripture, Roman epic. The same three-tradition equipoise. Wrath as the engine of three suicides, three filicides, three self-destructions.
The Beatitude the angel sings is Beati pacifici — blessed are the peacemakers. The line is from Matthew 5:9, and the gloss the angel adds — who are without ill anger — distinguishes between ira mala, the bad anger that destroys, and the ira bona that is righteous indignation against injustice. Dante never condemns righteous indignation; he condemns the anger that escapes its proper measure.
What to read for
Notice the apostrophe to Imagination near the beginning. Dante stops the narrative to address, directly, the faculty by which the visions reach him. The reader has to be told that the visions are not delivered by his ordinary senses; they are stamped, somehow, on his imagination from outside. The technical word in medieval psychology is fantasia, the inner faculty in which images are formed. The whole Commedia is, at one level, the report of a fantasia given exceptional access to the truth.
Notice the symmetry of the angel's appearance with the angel of XII and the angel of XV. Each angel sings a Beatitude; each erases a P with a wing; each leaves the pilgrim's step lighter. The seven angels of Purgatorio are the cantica's structural seven. Three are now done.
Notice the placement of Virgil's great speech. It is given not while walking but while sitting still on a stair at evening. The most architectural speech in the cantica is delivered in the cantica's only sustained moment of stillness. Pay attention to how often Dante allows his characters to stop moving before he allows them to speak the most important things.
From here on: illustrations and analysis. The three images below are scenes from the canto, and after them comes the close reading — famous lines quoted in full, paradoxes explained, political and theological freight unpacked. If you have not yet read the canto, stop here — read it, then come back.
After reading
What the canto did
The canto did three structurally different things in one hundred and thirty-nine lines, and the joins between them are nearly invisible. It walked the pilgrim out of the smoke of wrath into three closing ecstatic visions — Procne, Haman, Amata — each of them a great example of wrath ending in suicide or filicide. It met the third of Purgatory's seven angels, who sang the Beatitude of peace and erased the third P from the pilgrim's forehead with a sweep of one wing. And then, when night fell and the mountain's rule forbade further climbing, it sat the two poets down on a stair and let Virgil deliver the most architectural speech in the cantica — the doctrine of love misdirected as the structural principle of every terrace they had already climbed and every terrace yet to come. The whole mountain was here given its blueprint. The doctrine was placed at the cantica's structural midpoint, between the third and fourth terraces, between wrath and sloth, between the lower mountain organised by aggressive love and the upper mountain organised by self-indulgent love, exactly where the architecture pivots.
The three visions and what they say about wrath
Each of the three visions is a wrath whose end is the destruction of one's own. Procne kills her son Itys to revenge herself on her husband Tereus and becomes a bird forever singing her own grief. Haman, vizier to Ahasuerus, plans the genocide of all the Jews of Persia in revenge against the single Jew Mordecai and is hanged on the gallows he built for Mordecai's execution. Amata, queen of the Latins in Aeneid XII, hangs herself from a rafter rather than see her daughter Lavinia marry Aeneas — and her dying speech, which Dante slightly compresses, is the line his daughter pleads in the vision: O queen, why hast thou wished in anger to be naught? The three visions share a precise structure: wrath inflicted on a relative ends by destroying the wrathful self. Procne kills her child and loses her humanity; Haman kills no one and loses his life; Amata kills no one and loses both her life and her child's future. Wrath, in each case, is the sin whose damage runs backward into the soul who feels it.
Notice also the equipoise of traditions. Hebrew scripture, pagan myth, Roman epic — the same three sources the visions of meekness drew from in XV. The terrace is structured by a triple parallelism: three voices of virtue at its opening, three penitents along its road, three visions of vice at its closing. The whole architecture of each terrace's instruction is built on the medieval love of triples.
Why Virgil's speech is the mountain's blueprint
The doctrine Virgil delivers from the stair is, in its simplest form, this. Every act in the universe — every motion of every creature, every choice of every soul — is motivated by love. Love is the engine of everything. Neither Creator nor a creature ever was destitute of love, natural or spiritual. God acts out of love; the angels act out of love; the human soul acts out of love; the very stones fall toward the centre of the earth out of a kind of natural love. There is nothing in creation that is not love.
The corollary is that there is no such thing as a motiveless sin. Every sin is an act of love — but of love wrongly aimed, or wrongly proportioned. The seven deadly sins are therefore not seven different things; they are seven different ways the one thing can go wrong. The misdirections divide into three categories.
The first category is love perverted toward the harm of one's neighbour. The proud love their own excellence so much that they desire the abasement of others; the envious love their own position so much that they grieve at others' prosperity; the wrathful love their own injured selves so much that they will destroy whoever has injured them. These are the three lower terraces — the terraces below where the pilgrim now sits.
The second category is love deficient toward the highest good. The slothful love God genuinely, but feebly — too weakly to rouse themselves to pursue him with the energy he deserves. This is the single middle terrace, which the pilgrim is about to enter.
The third category is love excessive toward secondary goods. The avaricious love money and possessions to excess; the gluttonous love food and drink to excess; the lustful love sexual pleasure to excess. None of these goods is in itself evil — wealth, food, sexuality are all created good. The sin is in loving them past the measure that would leave room for love of the higher good. These are the three upper terraces — the terraces above where the pilgrim now sits.
The pattern is the mountain's architecture made visible. The whole climb is a passage through the geometry of the soul's possible errors in loving. Pride is at the bottom because it is the most aggressive perversion — love so misdirected it wants to harm what is around it. Lust is at the top because it is the gentlest excess — love of a true good carried only slightly past its measure. Sloth is in the middle because it is the only sin that consists in not loving enough.
A subtle and consequential implication. If all sin is love, then every damned soul in the Inferno — the canonical sinners the pilgrim has spent thirty-four cantos meeting — acted out of love. The lustful Francesca did love, even if she loved wrongly; the betrayer Brutus did love, even if he loved Caesar's office more than Caesar; Satan himself, at the bottom of Hell, was once the highest of created beings precisely because he was the most loving, and his fall was the conversion of that love into its opposite direction. The Commedia refuses the cheap satisfaction of a moral universe in which the bad are motivated by mere malice. Every wickedness in the poem is the misuse of an impulse that, properly directed, would have produced sanctity.
The fourth terrace, which the canto has just opened
The angel of peace has already lifted the third P. The night has fallen. The pilgrim is now on the fourth of the seven terraces — the terrace of sloth. Virgil's doctrine has placed it precisely: the only terrace whose sin is a deficiency of love. The slothful did not love wickedness; they did not even love secondary goods to excess; they simply did not love the highest good with the energy his nature demanded. The canto closes on this terrace not in motion but in repose. Tomorrow morning the pilgrim will see what penance the slothful do, and the irony will be exact: the souls who in life would not move will be made, in death, to run without stopping. The penance is the inverse posture of the sin, as on every terrace. But the canto's last word is night — the mountain's rule that climbing is forbidden after dark, which itself encodes the entire doctrine just delivered. The will, even when willing well, cannot move toward the good unless the light is given.
Famous and meaningful passages
The opening apostrophe.
Remember, Reader, if e'er in the Alps A mist o'ertook thee, through which thou couldst see Not otherwise than through its membrane mole… (Purg. XVII.1–3)
The reader is addressed directly. Ricorditi, lettor. The image of the Alpine mole-eye — the membrane through which the mole sees, dim and clouded — is one of Dante's exact natural similes for the smoke just left behind.
The invocation of Imagination.
O thou, Imagination, that dost steal us So from without sometimes, that man perceives not, Although around may sound a thousand trumpets… (Purg. XVII.13–15)
The faculty by which the visions reach the pilgrim is named directly. Fantasia, the medieval term for the inner faculty in which images are formed. The whole Commedia is, at one level, the report of a fantasia given exceptional access.
Procne.
Of her impiety, who changed her form Into the bird that most delights in singing, In my imagining appeared the trace. (Purg. XVII.19–21)
The Ovidian transformation summarised in a single tercet. The bird that most delights in singing — Procne as the swallow whose song is grief.
Haman.
Then reigned within my lofty fantasy One crucified, disdainful and ferocious In countenance, and even thus was dying. (Purg. XVII.25–27)
The Persian vizier of Esther, hanged on his own gallows, given the iconography of the Crucifixion — uno crocifisso — but with a face disdainful and ferocious, not the face of patient suffering. The juxtaposition is one of Dante's deliberately uncomfortable ones.
Amata.
There rose up in my vision a young maiden Bitterly weeping, and she said: O queen, Why hast thou wished in anger to be naught? (Purg. XVII.34–36)
Lavinia pleading with her mother Amata. The line why hast thou wished in anger to be naught — perché per ira hai voluto esser nulla — is one of the Commedia's most chilling pictures of wrath. The wrathful soul has willed to be nothing. Self-destruction is the sin's logical conclusion.
The angel of peace.
Near me perceived a motion as of wings, And fanning in the face, and saying, Beati Pacifici, who are without ill anger. (Purg. XVII.67–69)
Beati pacifici. Matthew 5:9 in three Latin words, with the angel's added gloss — che son sanz' ira mala — that distinguishes righteous indignation from the sin just purged. The poem will not condemn the prophetic anger of Marco Lombardo or of Dante himself.
The foundational tercet.
Neither Creator nor a creature ever, Son, he began, was destitute of love Natural or spiritual; and thou knowest it. (Purg. XVII.91–93)
The premise on which the whole doctrine rests. Né creator né creatura mai…fu sanza amore. There is nothing in the universe that is not love. The most consequential single tercet in the Purgatorio.
The corollary.
Hence thou mayst comprehend that love must be The seed within yourselves of every virtue, And every act that merits punishment. (Purg. XVII.103–105)
The radical conclusion. Every act that merits punishment — every sin — is also a love. The Commedia refuses the cheap moral universe in which sin is mere malice.
The three categories.
There are, who, by abasement of their neighbour, Hope to excel, and therefore only long That from his greatness he may be cast down. (Purg. XVII.115–117)
The first category — pride, envy, wrath. Love perverted toward another's harm.
If languid love to look on this attract you, Or in attaining unto it, this cornice, After just penitence, torments you for it. (Purg. XVII.130–132)
The second category — sloth. Defective love toward the highest good. The cornice they are about to enter.
The love that yields itself too much to this Above us is lamented in three circles. (Purg. XVII.136–137)
The third category — avarice, gluttony, lust. Excessive love toward lesser goods.
What to watch for
Watch the next canto continue the speech. XVII gave the architecture; XVIII will give the psychology of love and the mechanism of free will inside the architecture. The two cantos together form the cantica's central theological exposition.
Watch the slothful. They will appear at the start of XVIII as a great running crowd, sprinting through the night to make up for the time they would not spend in life. The penance is the inverse of the sin: those who would not move are now made to run.
Watch the doctrine return at the top of the mountain. The vision of love that Virgil has just sketched will, when the pilgrim reaches the summit in canto XXVII, be the foundation Virgil stands on as he releases the pilgrim to Beatrice with the words take thy pleasure as guide. The doctrine of love rightly directed is the licence for the will to be its own legislator. Virgil has, in this canto, prepared his own dismissal.
This post is part of Reading Divine Comedy, a slow daily companion to Dante's Commedia in the Longfellow translation — read one canto at a time, with a short orientation before and a close reading after. From Inferno I to Paradiso XXXIII.